FAQs : What is a URL?
Look up at the top of this web page.
Above the page you will see the "location bar"
of your web browser, which should contain something
very like this:
http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/basic/url.html
This is the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of the web
page you are looking at right now. A URL can be thought
of as the "address" of a web page and is sometimes
referred to informally as a "web address."
URLs are used to write links linking one page to another;
for an example, see the HTML entry.
A URL is made up of several parts. The first part is
the protocol, which tells the web browser what sort
of server it will be talking to in order to fetch the
URL. In this example, the protocol is http.
The remaining parts vary depending on the protocol,
but the vast majority of URLs you will encounter use
the http protocol; exceptions include file URLs, which
link to local files on your own hard drive, ftp URLs,
which work just like http URLs but link to things on
FTP servers rather than web servers, and mailto URLs,
which can be used to invite a user to write an email
message to a particular email address.
The second part of the example URL above is the fully
qualified domain name of the web site to connect to.
In this case, the fully qualified domain name is www.boutell.com.
This name identifies the web site containing the page.
The term "fully qualified domain name" refers
to a complete web site or other computer's name on the
Internet. The term "domain name" usually refers
only to the last part of the name, in this case boutell.com,
which has been registered for that particular company's
exclusive use. For more information about registering
domain names, see the setting up web sites entry.
The third part of the example URL is the path at which
this particular web page is located on the web server.
In this case, the path is /newfaq/basic/url.html. Similar
to a filename, a path usually indicates where the web
page is located within the web space of the web site;
in this case it is located in the basic sub-folder of
the newfaq folder, which is located in the top-level
web page directory of our web site.
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